Denver’s Chinatown took a violent hit on Oct. 31, 1880, after a wave of racist rioting and fires washed over the neighborhood, inside what’s now Lower Downtown. But there still may be a future for it.
“There are ideas for an art history project, for reactivating the alleyway, for designing new spaces and concepts,” said Leyuan Li, assistant professor of architecture at the University of Colorado Denver, as he surveyed models of redesigned buildings inside a History Colorado Center exhibit last week.
Unlike New York City, San Francisco or even Portland, Ore., Denver’s biggest modern concentration of Asian businesses is not downtown, but rather around Federal Boulevard, led by the historic, pan-Asian Far East Center.
Denver’s former Chinatown — along Wazee and Market streets, between 15th and 20th streets — was a flashpoint for many white residents and journalists who fed anti-Chinese sentiment by falsely stereotyping the area as a red-light district, according to History Colorado research. Over the decades, most people have forgotten that Denver even had a Chinatown, Li said, despite containing about 1,000 residents at its peak in 1890.
So Li worked with History Colorado and the Colorado Asian Pacific United Group, as well as his students, on an exhibit that would bring it back to life. Fortunately, “Where Is Denver’s Chinatown? Stories Remembered, Reclaimed, Reimagined” goes beyond the tragic 1880 event in which 3,000 white people attacked a far smaller number of Chinese immigrants, setting their homes and businesses ablaze in the process.
The exhibit’s goal is to collect and present detailed memories of the neighborhood, which housed mostly male Chinese workers who came to Denver during the mineral- and gold-rush era of the late 1800s.
Here and elsewhere, they faced persistent racism. The neighborhood’s unofficial name was Hop Alley, referencing racist tropes about opium use, and resident Look Young was lynched in the 1880 riot. But they also made daily lives for themselves as families diversified and grew, giving many Denverites their first taste of Chinese culture through restaurants (again, as with much of the U.S.) and other mom-and-pop businesses there.
History Colorado Center’s exhibition, which leans heavily on family recollections and a few, well-preserved artifacts, opened Oct. 10, but is being extended beyond its initial scheduled closing date of March 25, 2025, to accommodate more Denver Public School field trips, said Luke Perkins, manager of communications and public relations.
“It’s important that we had that population at the table to make this authentic,” Perkins said. “That’s what we try to do here with all of our exhibitions.”
Out of the 200 or so buildings that comprised the neighborhood, only 19 remain, owing to a 1940s demolition by the city of Denver that made space for more development, said Samantha Martin, the museum’s Temple Buell associate curator of architecture. But there’s hope for the future.
“Working with (Li’s) architecture students has been really special, just to see their passion for design and this subject,” she said. That includes detailed miniatures from Li’s students that imagine future live-work spaces, retail, food concepts and cultural offerings honoring the area’s Chinese history. That would of course require lots of money, but the planning is already there.
Artifacts are displayed in the Where is Denver’s Chinatown Exhibit at History Colorado in Denver on Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024. (Photo by Andy Cross/The Denver Post)
There have been other official efforts to honor Denver’s Chinese population in recent years, including murals and historic marker unveilings. Then-Denver Mayor Michael Hancock made an unusual public apology as part of the “Reclaiming Our Past, Building Our Future” event in April 2022.
Hancock issued his apology to the descendants of the Chin and Lung families, “who experienced the devastating effects of the 1880 anti-Chinese riot … that decimated a once thriving Asian American community. The city’s apology to the AAPI community marked the fifth official declaration in the nation and the first outside of California,” according to a university statement.
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That helped, but it didn’t change the fact that very little information remained about Chinatown, given that personal histories and Chinese-language print media from the time had all but vanished. The “memory work” of collecting photos, heirlooms, personal items such as clothing, and other artifacts is ongoing, Martin said.
“Chinese immigrants were seeking a better life for their families but faced so many obstacles,” she said. “That’s not so different than immigrants today.”